Players in the multimedia industry such as producers of news or entertainment programs may have thousands of hours of video content at their disposal. For example, a well-known television entertainment program reports possession of 100,000 hours of video content and adds approximately 60 hours per week.
Such programming often demands that the video content be available for editing in a very short timeframe. For example, a first segment of an entertainment television program may already be airing while a second segment is still in production. In this fast-paced environment, fast access to the information becomes critical.
Unfortunately, video content currently exists on videotape in either analog or serial digital format, hampering efficient access and review of the video's contents. The degradation of the original analog recordings is an even greater concern. Storing the information in a digital archive permits faster access to the information and reduces the problem of degradation.
To meet production quality, the information must be digitized at a high or broadcast resolution. At high resolution, more bandwidth is required to retrieve information from the archive, resulting in a slower and/or costlier retrieval system. Accordingly, there is a need to provide a digitally based video editing system that permits quick access to content for editing, yet provides a high quality content stream suitable for televising.
Currently, there are various solutions available to provide some of the functions necessary to create a compilation of existing video content. However, no single solution exists to provide the functions of digitizing an existing video archive for preservation, segmenting the video to create storyboards for review, accessing the content efficiently for viewing and selection purposes, creating edit decision lists of video source, and producing production quality content from the created lists. Additional desirable features include augmentation of existing descriptive information of the content, and storage of descriptive information (a.k.a. metadata) for efficient searching.
It is also desirable to provide a web-based video editing system readily accessible to users.